Michael B. Oren is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based research facility, and the contributing editor of its journal, Azure. He has authored numerous studies on the history and politics of the Middle East, and has written extensively for publications such as The New York Times, Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic, of which he is also a contributing editor. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, he has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. In Israel, he was a Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University and a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University.
Dr. Oren is the author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. The book was widely praised by reviewers, including those of The New York Times, The New Republic, the Economist, and the Times of London. It was listed as a national bestseller by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, and was named Editor’s Choice by The Atlantic Monthly. Six Days of War won the Los Angeles Times’ History Book of the Year prize and the National Jewish Book Award.
Raised in New Jersey, where he was an activist in Zionist youth movements and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabia Games, Michael Oren moved to Israel in the 1970s. He served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the paratroopers in the Lebanon War, and as a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War. He acted as a representative of the Prime Minister’s Office to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, and as an advisor to Israel’s delegation to the United Nations. He was the director of Inter-Religious Affairs in the government of Yitzhak Rabin. In 2004, he gave testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, and delivered the Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture at Oxford. He is currently on leave from Shalem as an Olin Fellow at Yale and the Nachshon Visiting Professor at Harvard.
In addition to his academic and political involvement, Michael Oren is the author of a collection of novellas, Sand Devil, all set in the Negev Desert, and a new novel, Reunion, published in 2004 by Penguin.
Michael Oren lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children.